


Maybe art will fill the screaming silence

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artists, Animal Death, Art, Art for the sake of art, Blood, Deadly pursuit of art, Finding Purpose, M/M, Muses, Mutilation, Purebloods (Harry Potter), Sexual Coercion, The Sublime, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 06:24:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18382787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Tom is an artist struggling to find new inspiration. Harry is a student trying to escape the mundane. When they meet they have to learn how far they'll go for the sake of art and art alone.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry about these weird AUs I keep writing. 
> 
> So my obsession with ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ was recently reawakened and this was the result. Once again, it’s not going to be sweet, because I can’t write sweet, but hey, at least it's not filled with murder right left and centre.

The gallery was fuller than usual, though most of its corridors were empty. The greatest number of people who had come had come to see a single painting, one that hung in the corner of the gallery, stark against the white walls. It was a painting by an artist who would come to dominate artistic circles, indeed this was their entry ticket. They were, of course, by no means unknown before, but they had lurked in the shadows, waiting and watching, lingering and learning. Now though, they had begun to unfurl themselves, started to stretch out their fingers from the dark and pour themselves onto a canvas. The people watched in silence. Confused as to how a mere painting could invoke such revulsion, such disgust and yet such awe, wonder, and astonishment? There was a simple beauty in every stroke, a true soul woven into the colours, a horror scratched into every corner. It was sublime and grotesque. A gorgeous portrait that wasn’t a portrait at all, for it was too personal to be that alone. There was too much of the artist to be a mere portrait of the sitter. It was almost erotic to sit and watch them, colours colliding and curling, dancing and delighting, entwining and engendering some new angel-demon that bowed down before God and kissed the hand of the Devil. People felt sick but could not look away from such sweet suffering. But if they had, they would have seen. They would have noticed the only two people who were not staring, the only two people who were not enthralled because they had seen this all before. A man with paint permanently ingrained in his fingertips sat on one side of the room, he was watching, with almost the same intensity as the people, a young man who sat across the gallery. A young man with Lichtenberg figures spread all the way down his neck, a young man who wrung his hands and twisted his fingers, which if people had gone and talked to him, or even just looked ever so closely, they would have seen were covered in tiny stinging cuts as though he had grated his fingers with such care. If they had looked closer still, they would have seen the products of the abusive lover that is art splattered all over his skin. Perhaps then they might have understood the lengths that fanatics will go to create sublime art.


	2. Chapter 2

**three months earlier**

Tom 

Tom stared at the sky, it was raining like it always was. Just grey water falling from a grey sky, bleeding down onto him, coating his skin in cold, not that he was going to move. He couldn’t bear to go back home, not when home was just as dull, just as empty, just as cold as the world out here. People said that was the life of an artist, that he had no right to complain, that great genius had to endure great suffering, and that was just how it was. But that didn’t change what he thought, and Tom still didn’t want to go home to grey rooms filled with grey people and grey smoke. Friends who were not friends but merely leaches. They had all once been useful, muses for a short while, each and every one of them had had their purpose. But one by one they had lost their spark, the colours of talent had seeped away, and in its place grew greyness. Endless greyness. Tom had no time for grey. People sometimes said that _he_ was the reason that they lost their colours, he sucked their souls out and poured them onto a canvas. Fashioned their very consciousness from their bodies and turned them into nothing but paint, made them all into people who would never know beauty again because they had seen in their own faces painted with such perfection upon canvases. It was his fault for ruining them. But Tom did not care for their ruination, only that they had served their purpose and now they were burnt out and in need of replacing, like lightbulbs that now failed at their very function, to light the way in the dark. So Tom did not want to go home to a house filled with grey ghosts, and thus he stayed, staring at the sky and freezing under the rain. To be honest though, there was more interest to be had in nature, than people. Above him the clouds swirled and churned, turning over and over one another, twisting and contorting, asphalt mixed with ash and concrete, so many shades of grey, each as boring as the last. He needed someone new. Someone with colour, a match or an overflowing sink that would spill colour back into his world, let him paint again. He sighed, no longer able to feel his fingers, because he was going to be waiting a long time. Inspiration had not come to him yet, and it had been nearly a year since his last infatuation. He had painted since then, but nothing sublime, nothing soul-shattering, only the basic and uninspired drawing of a mediocre artist. He sighed again, knowing that the rain would scare away all potential inspiration as though they were butterflies, and perhaps they were. Simple little creatures that always escaped his fingers, fluttered away like dreams when you wake. He would just have to cross off yet another day, return to his grey home and hope that colour would come back tomorrow.  
As Tom walked back through the city, it was both loud and empty, the rain smashing itself against the pavement, pummelling the cobbles and filling every crack. He watched channels form, and the water rushing down towards the drain, as though the world would be better there. There were no butterfly-people out, those that were in the city hid in doorways, cowered in shops and spoke to one another about how they had not seen such torrential rain for so long. The rest were in cars and taxis and buses. Tom could not see them as he walked down the side streets, but he could hear the rage of the rain on car roofs, and the angry horns of locals blaring to get passed when the road markings had become so blurred that tourists were left lost. The lights too were deafening, the sharp white cutting through the streaks of rain and slicing right into his eyes. The muted red hopeless to tell what was happening, it wouldn’t be long before there was a collision, before there was carnage on High Street and ambulance sirens would be heard screaming all over the city. He walked on. What was the point in staying to watch things that he knew were going to happen? Anyway, the rain was bitter, little bullets that delighted in embedding themselves in his skin. Though, whilst they were painful, they were not cold. For there comes a point when you’re so soaked that you no longer notice, that the cold becomes so bone-deep that it is barely cold at all.  
His street was empty, the people who lived around him were recluses, hiding from their pasts or sometimes their futures. The curtains on every house and every apartment were always drawn and each door had several locks. That was how they all liked it. Complete isolation together.  
Flat seventy-seven was up on the seventh floor, high enough to see the grey mist hanging over the city streets, choking anything and everything. From the first step inside the hallway, Tom could smell that Malfoy was currently hanging around, like a limpid that didn’t know when to let go. His cologne was a personal advertisement to his presence. It said when he was here and reminded Tom when he wasn’t. It was an ever-present scent that no matter what he did he couldn’t get it out from the carpet or the walls or the furniture, or his sheets. Once upon a time, he’d found Malfoy to be endearing, but so too had been Lestrange and Avery and Rosier, none of them were anymore. Just boys with too much money and too much time and too little personality. Malfoy was the worst, the richest little sycophant he’d ever had the pleasure of meeting. He was different from the others. There was something unnerving about him, unsettling in his smile, something cold and sweet and deadly just below his skin. It was an intoxicating combination that Tom had just had to have, had to touch, had to paint, and he had, but Malfoy was like a mould, and now that Tom had let him in, he’d never get him out again. Malfoy was different from the others, not just a pretty face but a pretty brain as well. An intelligent creature that knew what it wanted and knew how he was going to get it. He was the _only_ one of Tom’s muses that seemed to understand how the world worked, how, whatever Tom might say, he couldn’t refuse the money that Malfoy offered him to do pathetic things. Not that any of those things made the grey lift from his vision anymore. Malfoy was still rotting like the rest of them, but not even rotting really, only turning to dust, just melting into the background. If they had rotted, Tom would have had a reason to stay around and watch, but when they were just disintegrating, well what was the point?  
“You were a long time.” The voice echoed despite his apartment being so small, it carried out from the sitting room and into the hall, hollow and empty and cold, so very Malfoy.  
“Can I not go where I please?” Tom said, saying it to the empty hall, knowing Malfoy would hear. It felt terribly domestic, far too domestic if he was honest, but Malfoy was here now, and he had to face him. Tom took off his coat slowly and hung it up, not that it really made much difference, he was still drenched and shivering and uninspired.  
As Malfoy still hadn’t made his appearance, Tom walked towards the sitting room, as he did so his footsteps seemed loud and house unusually quiet.  
Malfoy was alone on the sofa, reading one of the books from the table and looking all too expensive for his cheap apartment. He was sitting how he used to sit when Tom gave him attention, head tipped back, one leg bent at the knee, one hand holding the book, the other draped dramatically. The picture of decadent youth. If Tom looked carefully there was still the faintest traces of colour at the corner of his mouth, a bubblegum pink that reminded him why Malfoy had been so interesting, but even that was fading now, dissolving before his eyes until all that remained was grey.  
“Don’t you have a wife to get home to, Malfoy?” said Tom, leaning against the doorframe and watching Malfoy stretch like a cat. Fingers, then wrists, then shoulder, then back, then neck, all clicking delicately. He seemed to lean further into the chair, getting more comfortable rather than leaving.  
“Don’t you have a painting you’re supposed to working on, Tom?” Malfoy countered, putting the book down on the floor and sitting up, a hand running through his hair. Tom glared and Malfoy smiled. “See we both have things that we’re supposed to be doing.”  
“Why are you here, Malfoy?” said Tom, after all, Malfoy rarely deigned to step foot into a place as vulgar as this unless he thought he could get something, that, and Tom had been ignoring him for quite a while now.  
“Because I’m bored,” he was standing now, standing and walking over, too confident. Tom closed his eyes, expecting to feel Malfoy’s fingers on his cheek, and his lips against his own, like he usually did. But today he didn’t. Malfoy instead leaning on the other side of the doorframe, watching him.  
“Why aren’t you painting, Tom?”  
“You know why,” he said, avoiding Malfoy’s eyes. All those months ago, it was those eyes that were first thing Tom had noticed go grey, they were still intense, still painfully scrutinising, but they were also grey, dull, dull grey.  
“I can give you some inspiration, all you have to do is ask me nicely.”  
“Money is not inspiration.”  
Malfoy stepped forward, his hand brushing against Tom’s shoulder, “money can buy _anything_ you want.”  
“And if I refuse?”  
“You’re not in the position to refuse Tom, you never have been,” Malfoy said leaning closer and pressing their mouth together, it felt nostalgic but tasted stale. Tom didn’t pull away, whether he liked it or not, Malfoy was right, he needed the money, and the longer he didn’t paint, the more he needed it, and the longer Malfoy stuck around the longer he wasn’t going to paint, it was a vicious circle, and didn’t Malfoy know it, didn’t he love it.  
“How much?” he found himself saying.  
“Enough.”  
“How much?” he repeated, and Malfoy finally moved his artificially sweetened mouth away from Tom’s, further enough away that Tom could see him smile, “more than you’re worth, Tom.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is weird, apologies for that, it has just irritatingly buzzing around my brain for ages now

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry for starting yet another new fic that isn't complete, but I'm not planning on abandoning any of them and will get round to updating all of them sometime in June.


End file.
